Hi,

Thinking of playing BG3 on a different computer. is there a way to Transfer the GOG BG3 game without a complete re-install? This would save alot of download time.

if its a Galaxy install copy the game folder + the save game/profile folder onto the new computer, hit the verify game and restart once the verify is finished... a 60 g folder should take around 30 mins for average cpu but the actual download will be small

if its an off line install you are screwed

If it's an offline install then just copy the installer (and patches?) and install again on a new pc. This is not what I would call screwed.

true if he kept a copy of the installers

That's kinda the point.

If you want to run a program on a new computer you have to install it on that computer. Otherwise it wouldnt be present.

That's not entirely true. If you copy all the files you can reasonably find and put them in the right places, many games will recreate whatever is missing when you launch them. I won't go into detail, but I've had some experience with using games in this fashion. On the other hand, I wouldn't personally attempt it because it would take a significant amount of time, might not work at all, and I am lazy as heck and have better things to do.

Any executable could theoretically be transplanted this way if you can find all the changes it needs. However, those changes may include hidden directories (%APPDATA%, etc), as well as the registry, the system environment, etc. Finding all the different spots that an installer makes changes can be tricky (there are some malware analysis sandboxes that can help with this if you *really* want to do it, but you'd need to install into the sandbox).

Doing it that way will undoubtedly introduce far more downtime than using the Galaxy installer, or even re-downloading all of the offline install files manually, and just reinstalling.

I'm sure there might be reasons to find a way to port an install from one machine to another, but saving downtime is probably not one of them.

True. And it's what the op was asking about.

If the game could't recreate the registry data, you could just install GOG Galaxy and "import the game folder".
Then Galaxy is recreating all the stuff and connecting all things together to get a working game.

This may also happen on Linux in a Prefix (Steam, Lutris, Heroic).

Best regards

P.S.
I know, that is not an "offline only" solution. ;-)